Gas Prices

I'm surprised no thread has been created yet about this. So far here I have seen as low as $1.64 but GasBuddy shows low of $1.61. With oil prices still fluctuating, who know how low and how long this will last.

No doubt for the consumer this is a great stimulus. Better than the government created ones.

For the industry and then larger economy, maybe not.

Investors are saying there's around a trillion worth of derivatives exposed currently, many of which are currently upside down. A few calls and this could head south quick. The oil industry itself has hundreds of billions tied to shale technology and development of which around $150 billion is debt. Shale's bottom is around $40-$50 a barrel, then the losses are real.

One of my customers is a large oil company. They've been beating our door down for months on creative ways to assist in capital preservation.

OPEC isn't doing any new exploration, or had any new major expenditures or investment into shale. They're break even is around $20. The Kuwait's state their break even is around $10.

Layoffs in any considerable scale started in October. They've been continuing since.

To think I can go buy a gallon of gas at $1.74. About $.40 is state and federal tax. Putting me at $1.34. I can go buy a 16 oz water at the same store for $1.20. Free market economy? No chance, there's serious manipulation going on all over.

Then factor in the serious under-reporting of the demand. Demand is way down. The government numbers hide this little factoid.

So far the lowest price I have seen are at $1.91. While my wife was in Georgia during New Year, she bought gas in Tenn. for $1.74.

$1.92 here a few days ago but has jumped back up to $1.99. Prices this low are good for consumers, bad for the oil bidness- the oilfield services company I used to work for announced they were laying off 9000 people worldwide. Demand won't increase until we get rid of the buffoons in Washington and then the economy will really grow and expand.

The price of diesel is RIDICULOUS! !!! No reason it should be around a dollar more than gas. Or at least I don't see any reasons.

Blame your government- between the regs requiring ULSD (ultra low sulfur diesel) and the additional fuel taxes they put on diesel, a buck a gallon more for diesel isn't surprising.

That is not the whole story.Now that the US is producing clean ULSD we can sell it abroad. A few years ago it was shown in government import/export data that the US was EXPORTING 750K+ barrels of refined ULSD PER DAY. I can only imagine that number has increased.

Can't recall if that was discussed on this site or another however.....joemac did you post that link?

That is not the whole story.Now that the US is producing clean ULSD we can sell it abroad. A few years ago it was shown in government import/export data that the US was EXPORTING 750K+ barrels of refined ULSD PER DAY. I can only imagine that number has increased.

No question ULSD is being exported (good for U.S. jobs) but that strong demand plays a pretty big part in driving diesel prices up not to mention ULSD costs more to produce and then pile on higher goobermint fuel taxes on diesel ... it's not hard to see why diesel costs more, about 80 cents more per gallon vs. unleaded regular in my neck of the woods. If the gov't would get out of the way and let 'em build the Keystone XL pipeline among other things, I think the price differential would narrow considerably.

But now that prices have fallen so far, the XL pipeline isn't as economical if at all. But if it is done it will not have a noticeable effect on fuel prices going down. What it will do is keep prices low and help fund a northern neighbor that shares many of our values vs the others.

Since Diesel fuel comes out of the crude oil first and is a more valuable commodity on the global scale it is making gasoline a by product in the US. That along with increased FE of cars and the proliferation of hybrids/EVs is lowering the demand for gasoline as well. The cost of USLD was only .05-.10/gal over reg Diesel when they announced it back in the mid '00s. The Diesel/gas spread was not that great back in '06 when USLD was released.

We got down to about $2.20 here. For no apparent reason we are around $2.60 now.

I'm curious why there is so much difference in price between the gas stations. At one intersection around me there are stations on three of the four corners and the prices vary by as much as .60 for the same grade gas.

Same thing here. Left my house station after station $1.99, got to our destination $1.75, mile down the road $1.99.

An analyst commented this last week that there are no fundamentals as the basis of price, the volatility being baseless, allows price to have large moves and swings. Fiat trading. It's so bad even retail can't keep up.

Is that a U.S. gallon, or Imperial. When is your currency going to go back up? I have invested in Canadian currency a few years back as it was stable, and if there was a collapse of the American dollar I would still have Canadian money.

____________________________________Don't believe everything you read on the internet- George Washington.

Supposedly our dollar dropped drastically with the fall of crude oil prices and ultimately gas prices. Apparently they will both be slowly on the rise again, so maybe our dollar will follow suit. On the flip side though, our manufacturing benefits more from a lower dollar, as trade with the U.S. increases.